To bring cost-efficient, high-quality fixed broadband connectivity to metro area network (MAN) users, Fujitsu Microelectronics America Inc. (FMA) has developed a highly integrated WiMAX system-on-a-chip (SoC) using its 0.18 micron CMOS process. Labeled MB87M3400, 802.16-2004 compliant SoC is designed to enable deployment of broadband wireless access (BWA) equipment for both base stations and subscriber stations in licensed or license-exempt bands of 2 GHz to 11 GHz.

Meanwhile, to facilitate the development of WiMAX-capable BWA systems, FMA and SiGe Semiconductor Inc. are jointly developing a complete reference design based on Fujitsu's MB87M3400 and SE7351L/SE7051L RF transceiver chipset from SiGe Semiconductor. The reference design includes all of the software and hardware required to design residential and enterprise customer premise equipment. According to FMA, the reference design will be submitted to the WiMAX Forum^™ for certification in the third quarter.

“As part of our commitment to standards development and compliance programs, Fujitsu Microelectronics and SiGe Semiconductor are working closely together to provide OEMs with the most effective mix of technologies for high-performance WiMAX-compliant equipment,” said Keith Horn, senior vice president of sales and marketing for FMA. “The combination of our WiMAX-compliant SoC and SiGe's leading-edge RF devices provides manufacturers with an easy route to achieving the integration and performance required for next-generation broadband wireless systems.”

One of the early adopters of Fujitsu's WiMAX SoC is Aperto Networks. Using the engineering samples of MB87M3400, SoC emulation platform, and reference design, Aperto has developed WiMAX-compliant base station and subscriber units. “The accelerated availability of the SoC is critical for our milestones, and multiple-carrier field trials have been planned with our WiMAX systems using the Fujitsu chip,” said Aperto CEO Reza Ahy. The two partners have made progress on pre-certification testing of all system functionalities, and are well on-track for the WiMAX Forum July 2005 early-stage Plugfest and tests at the WiMAX Forum certification lab CETECOM in Barcelona, Spain, noted Ahy.

The MB87M3400 uses an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) physical layer (PHY) that supports channels from 1.75 MHz up to 20 MHz, and can operate in time-division duplex (TDD) or frequency-division duplex (FDD) modes, with support for all available channel bandwidths. A programmable frequency selection generates the sample clock for any desired bandwidth, and a 256-point Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used for broadband transmission. When applying 64-QAM modulation in a 20 MHz channel and using all 192 subcarriers, the SoC can sustain raw peak data speeds up to 100 Mbps. Uplink sub-channelization is also supported.

The WiMAX SoC incorporates sophisticated processing power, including an ARM-926 RISC engine that implements the 802.16 upper-layer MAC, scheduler, drivers, protocol stacks, and user application software. Also on board is an ARC RISC/DSP, which executes lower-layer MAC functions, offloading processing from the upper layer MAC and enhancing total performance. A multichannel DMA controller handles high-speed transactions among agents on a high-performance bus.

Additionally, it also incorporates radio control and all the required analog circuits, along with a comprehensive set of integrated peripheral functions. To ensure security, the MB87M3400 uses DES/3-DES/AES/CCM encryption/decryption engine for the 802.16 MAC privacy sub-layer. The device also includes a memory controller, along with an Ethernet engine for interfacing to networks, a high-performance digital-to-analog converter (DAC) for automatic frequency control, and an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for flexibly interfacing to the baseband. Early field trials show that maximum power consumption in basic base station operation at room temperature is between 2 W to 3 W. While in subscriber station mode with embedded processor on, the power consumption can be as high as 6 W. The MB87M3400 comes in a 436-pin BGA package.

For more information, visit http://us.fujitsu.com/micro/WiMAX